As the business world has become relentlessly more competitive and as system resources such as data processing and communication equipment have become increasingly complex, it has become advantageous for a business enterprise to engage a specialized service provider to maintain, repair, and manage system resources. Engaging a specialized service provider frees a business to focus on its core activities rather than on its system resources. Moreover, a specialized service provider may achieve expertise and economies of scale in its niche that are unavailable to its customers, whose business interests lie elsewhere.
In some situations, a service provider may have a central facility that remotely services a number of customers. In other situations, the service provider may share facilities with the customer. In either case, the service provider must have a user account that enables the service provider to gain access to the customer's system resources in order to diagnose and repair problems.
Today, such accounts are maintained in two ways: either the service provider has a user account that stands open full time, or the customer manually opens and closes an account whenever the service provider needs access to system resources.
Unfortunately, both of these ways of maintaining accounts have significant disadvantages. In the first situation, having an open standing account exposes the customer to breaches of security by vandals who enter through the open account. In the second situation, waiting for the ad hoc opening of an account when service is needed delays the resolution of the customer's problems, and may lead to unwanted loss of business or degradation of operational efficiency.
Thus there is a need for an improved way of providing an account that enables a service provider to access a customer's system resources in a timely and responsive way so that problems may be resolved as quickly as possible, and yet does not subject the customer to the security risks associated with having a standing open account.